We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Johnny Michael. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Johnny below.
Johnny, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?
Hi 👋, Johnny here.
The mission behind my company (Hi 👋 or Happy interactions) is to be one of the friendliest brands in the world. I think there’s opportunity to create something that helps connect people and spark pleasant interactions. In order for humanity to thrive we need to keep finding ways to reach each other.
Saying Hi is a spark that can lead to so many things — in a simple way, it leads to kindness, and kindness leads to trust, and that creates foundations for friendships and leads to love. While there are many different social circumstances and anxieties people have about meeting each other, I think we can all agree, that acknowledging each other and creating a culture where it is common to look each other in the eye and honor one another as human beings is a good thing for our world.
I’m not saying we should all have to stop and talk, wasting away our energy on small talk. It’s about being more conscious and aware to those around us. Making people feel seen can have a big difference. And why shouldn’t we? Isn’t it amazing to be alive right now? Isn’t it amazing that there’s another form of intelligent life walking on the sidewalk near you, in your apartment building or working alongside you!
Right now as a brand we’re celebrating greetings from around the world by mainly selling merchandise and apparel, but I feel there’s a lot more through storytelling, community and innovative ideas that we can do to create a brand that brings people together and shifts our culture around greeting each other. The commonality of our greetings is something that binds us — greeting is a universal human behavior but with so many unique ways to do it all around the world. Building Hi has been a fun way to educate myself and learn about the deeper meanings behind them.
Johnny, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Alongside running my business Hi, I work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Back in early 2010s, I created my portfolio site to get jobs, I called it HiJohnny.com… around 2017 I got an idea to create a series of videos of me waving in different locations. I used that to create a splash page video for the site, I still do those waving videos and the video is on YouTube, it’s 40 minutes of me waving in different cities and fun spots. (I’d love to keep doing these and finding ways to leveling up the creativity or collaborating with other artists for cameos) Around 2021, I thought it would be fun to start selling merch that says Hi and from there I got the idea that I could start an interesting brand concept that celebrated greetings from every corner of the globe. Bada boom! That’s where I’m at now, it’s been an adventure learning all the ways people say Hi, and my latest project is working on creating fun pronunciation videos for each greeting, there’s over 150 greetings on the site now. It’s gonna take me a bit…
I’ve spent my career focusing on writing but I have pursued and practiced lots of creative activities. Like filmmaking, comedy, photography, commerical directing, storyboarding and drawing… I try to focus on all things that circumnavigate the path toward being a great storyteller. Heck I’ve even done some acting. Rather than say master of none, I prefer to keep it positive and say I’ve got range! But also need to be honest about potentially having too many hobbies, and careful about how I focus my energy.
On top of growing Hi into a globally recognized brand and successful business, I’d love to navigate my career to do more directing and get to place where I can create and shepard meaningful stories. I’ve always been confident in my abilities to build relationships and create ideas that solve problems for others, and I love doing that all in a way that uses humor. Comedy has always been a natural gift and compass for me in my life, the goal is to find a way to put that gift into the world but not go broke.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.
Hi is built on Shopify and we use third party print-on-demand services like Printify and Printful to create our products and handle shipping. The business simply would not have been possible to create without these P.O.D. companies. There simply would be too many start-up costs. I feel like this a great way to put out the proof of concept for the Hi brand. It allows me to put the idea out there and start snowballing it without the pressure and pain of the up front costs. Being able to experiment and add an unlimited amount of products is also huge. I think there’s lots of opportunity for the Hi brand to evolve and change from this platform, offering even higher quality service and packaging details, but it’s been the wisest way to start and introduce Hi to the world!
Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?
This is something I want to do more of. We have a great base of customers and people we’ve worked with on photoshoots that I’d love to keep the good energy going with. I have lots of ideas to create communal experiences around the brand. Friendly Competitions for some pickleball or golf events, Friendly Feasts to gather for meals and connect people… It’s definitely something I want to do more of, but I simply need more help and more people on my team to do so. Growing the brand is going to take growing a team. Putting it out there if anybody wants to come give a helping hand to Hi!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://happyinteractions.co/
- Instagram: @happyinteractions
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkkc1-wgz4fZaZJtyhGealfcoT87VqXL1&feature=shared
- Other: https://www.hijohnny.com/
Image Credits
Johnny Michael